An Analysis On The Conversational Implicature In Anne Of Green Gables From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

Since published in 1908 for the first time, Anne of Green Gables, written by Canadian female writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, has received plenty of positive reviews. This book that describes the growing up of the main character Anne Shelly has become the author’s most representative work. After Anne of Green Gables, the author has published a series of novels about the same Anne, but the original novel seems to be most welcomed by readers. The work on this book started in 1904. Since the first publishing in 1908, the book has been translated into nearly 50 languages with fans all over the world. Anne, a fairly positive and talkative little girl who is also filled with colourful imaginations is loved by people from every corner of the world and inspires their lives.This thesis has reviewed the research on Lucy Maud Montgomery and her representative work Anne of Green Gables. It seems that most of such research focuses on the translation and analysis of characters and few people have studied it in terms of pragmatics. The conversations in Anne of Green Gables are analyzed and the utterances which flout one or several maxims of Cooperative Principle are interpreted in order to explore the feasibility and necessity of analyzing this book with pragmatics.In recent years, pragmatics has increasingly become a vital branch of linguistics, with the main research object the utterances in different communicating context. And how these utterances are interpreted and applied is the significant task. This thesis will use Cooperative Principle as an analytical framework to analyze the conversations in Anne of Green Gables with the purpose of exploring how these principles are flouted. And these implicit conversations also indirectly reflect the needs of the context, their owners’real intentions and their characteristics.This thesis is comprised of three parts:the Introduction, main content and the Conclusion. More specifically,This first part is the Introduction which introduces the development process of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its current research status, and its application fields. And after this, based on the current study on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s master work Anne of Green Gables, the practicality and necessity of analyzing the conversational implicature in the book will be interpreted from the perspective of flouting Cooperative Principle.The second part is the main content of this thesis and is comprised of five chapters.In Chapter Ⅰ, the literature review will be made. Firstly, the meanings of conversation will be exemplified and then the four characteristics of Cooperative Principle suggested by Grice will be explicated. At the end of this chapter, it is demonstrated that following and flouting Cooperative Principle supplement each other. The speaker’s conversational implicature can be achieved by flouting Cooperative Principle.In Chapter Ⅱ, the cases that flout quantity maxim are interpreted and analyzed in detail. In the utterances which flout quantity maxim, there could be either too much information or too little of it. In order to let a normal conversation proceed, information provided by the talkers must come in appropriate amount. In a novel, saying too much or too little of talkers could both influence the conversation. And these influences normally have their implicit meanings indicating the characters’real intentions indirectly.In Chapter Ⅲ, detailed analyses of the cases that flout quality maxim are made. On certain occasions, the speaker provides some false information aiming to convey his or her real intention to the listener. In this chapter, how the conversations in the novel flout quality maxim by using irony, hyperbole and rhetorical questions will be interpreted and investigated. These three rhetoric methods flout quality maxim and provide false or uncertified information. But they also show the speakers’intentions more vividly and reveal their characteristics.In Chapter Ⅳ, the cases that flout relation maxim are examined and analyzed. Relation maxim suggests that there are certain relations among what the talkers have said. Characters in this novel frequently flout this maxim. They will communicate their real intentions by saying something totally unrelated.In Chapter Ⅴ, the cases that flout manner maxim are interpreted and analyzed. In this chapter, how characters in Anne of Green Gables flout manner maxim will be investigated by using obscure words and ambiguous, prolix or incomplete sentences, and their real intentions will be explored.The last part is the Conclusion. This chapter concludes all the exemplifications and analysis:in conversation, the speaker will either be "following" or "flouting", which are often twined. To continue the conversation, talkers have to follow Cooperative Principle. But under certain circumstances, they will break the cooperation, namely flout Cooperative Principle. This flouting will reveal the characters’real intentions and make their characteristics more distinctive.